Insert Video Clips in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

If you want to insert a video clip within your PowerPoint slide, spare a thought for why you would insert video clips in the first place. Most of the video clips are just added to grab attention. Fortunately, there are a few good reasons to adding video clips. Let us explore these, and then show you how you can add a video clip to your slide in PowerPoint 2013. Here are the good reasons:

You need to show how a machine process works, and a recorded video clip is far more simpler to insert than animating the entire sequence.
An important person cannot attend an event and sends his or her message as a recorded video clip, and you insert this video clip on the first slide.
You want to show recorded video coverage to strengthen your point-of-view.
Finally, the video clip should add value to the presentation and be beneficial to your audience.

Some points that you should consider while inserting a video clip in PowerPoint 2013 are:

Your presentation should have been saved at least once before inserting the video.
Your video clip should be in a PowerPoint friendly file format.
Preferably, copy any movie/video file you want to insert to the same folder which includes the presentation. (important only if you want to link videos from your slides).

The last option ensures that your video links always work. Yes, this is less of a problem with PowerPoint 2013 since this version embeds any inserted videos as part of the presentation itself, and we explain this further later on this page. Now, follow these steps to learn how to insert a video clip in PowerPoint 2013:

Open your presentation and navigate to the slide where you want to insert a video clip. From the Insert tab of Ribbon, click the lower half of the Video button to bring up the drop-down menu shown in Figure 1. Within the drop-down menu choose the Video on My PC option.

Figure 1: Video on My PC option
This brings up the Insert Video dialog box, as shown in Figure 2. Locate the folder where your videos are saved, and select any video clip you want to insert by clicking on it.

Figure 2: Insert Video dialog box
You can now click the Insert button (refer to Figure 2 above). This option adds the movie to the slide and also embeds it as part of your presentation file. Doing so can balloon the file size, and to avoid this bloat, you can just link the video or movie clip rather than embedding it by following the alternative option explained next.

To link rather than embed, click on the down-arrow next to the Insert button (see Figure 3). This brings up a menu with three options:
- Insert (which is the same as discussed in the preceding paragraph).
- Link to File which links the video. Note that if you choose to link rather than embed, always copy your video or movie clip to the same folder as your presentation before you insert it within your slide.
- Show previous versions allows you to open a previous version of the video (if it exists). This option is based on native functionality available in Microsoft Windows.
  
  Figure 3: Link to File option
Whichever option you choose (as explained above), PowerPoint will place the video on your slide as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Video placed on slide
Click on the video to play, or use the Play button on the Player Controls below the video clip, as shown in Figure 4 above. You can also set the video to play automatically during the Slide Show. To do so, select the video. Two Video Tool contextual tabs appear on the Ribbon. Click the Video Tools Playback contextual tab of the Ribbon to activate it as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Video Tools Playback tab of the Ribbon

This tab contains different options to control the playback of the video you have selected. Open the Start drop-down list as shown in Figure 6, and select the Automatically option.

Figure 6: Option to start playing video automatically
Save your presentation.